Fig. 1

Phylogenetic analysis and schematic domain architecture of Dicer proteins. The tree in a was built based on the alignment of the two catalytic conserved Ribonuclease domains (IPR000999/PF00636) of Dicer homologs identified in the studied Acari species using MAFFT [42]. The studied species include: Varroa destructor (Vd), Varroa jacobsoni (Vj), Tetranychus urticae (Tu), Ixodes scapularis (Is), Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus (Dp), Tropilaelaps mercedesae (Tm), Euroglyphus maynei (Em), Metaseiulus occidentalis (Mo) and Sarcoptes scabiei (Ss). Homologs of Dicer proteins in Caenorhabditis elegans (Ce), Drosophila melanogaster (Dm) and Dermatophagoides farinae (Df) were also included in this tree. The species names were abbreviated for convenience and the letters (a, b and c) following the names of some species indicate the number of protein copies found in their genomes. The tree was constructed using PhyML [43], with the model recommended by Lefort et al. [44] under the Akaike information criterion (AIC) (LG + G) with 500 bootstrap replicates. The domain architecture of Dicer proteins in b was generated by searching for known conserved domains in the Pfam database using InterProScan [40], HmmScan [41] and the online motif search tool (https://www.genome.jp/tools/motif/). The letters (a, b and c) indicate the number of protein copies found in their genomes